All Is Vanity (24 page)

TED WAITED UNTIL WE WERE ON THE PLANE TO ASK
. “So,” he said, shaking the last of his Bloody Mary mix from the can into his plastic cup, “are you really halfway through?”

I was engrossed in
Alias Grace
, but I did hear the question.

Ted tilted his head forward to look into my face. “It’s all right, you know, if you aren’t. A third of the way would really be just fine at this point.”

When I didn’t answer, I could tell he was worried that he might once again have said something I would think he had no right to say. Which, in fact, he had. “I mean, I would think the later stuff would come more quickly, once you’ve got your characters
established,” he went on, trying to gain a purchase. And then he gave up altogether. “Are you going to eat your peanuts?”

“Yes,” I said. I bit down on the crinkled edge of the stubborn little bag the flight attendant had dropped on the napkin beside my club soda.

“ ‘Yes’ you’re halfway through or ‘yes’ you’re going to eat your nuts?” Evidently, he had not given up altogether.

And, I, evidently, was no longer a scrupulously honest person. “Yes to both,” I said. This book had made a liar of me. Which could be good, I thought, staring down at the Great Basin. Maybe my habit of truthfulness had been standing in the way of my being able to fabricate a story.

“Well, that’s great, Margaret. Really great.” Ted sat back for a moment and then turned to me again. “Can I read it?”

The man in the seat ahead of me tilted his chair back so that his head hung just over my tray table, squeezing my space down to the compact L my body made pressed against the upholstery. “I think,” I said slowly, as if I were actually considering Ted’s question, “that I’d rather if you waited until I had a whole draft done. That’s when your response would really be constructive.” As opposed to now, when your response would be moaning and shouting, I thought.

“Sure,” he said. “That makes sense. It would just be fun to read.” He closed his hand over mine on the armrest. “It sounds so good.”

I wished it were possible to open the scratched rectangle of Plexiglas at my shoulder and allow myself to be sucked into the blue oxygenless air. I felt, for the first time in my married life, utterly alone, as if I were not sitting pinched in a plane with my husband on one side holding my hand and some stranger in front of me with his head in my lap but was instead dragging my way
across the hard sands of the endless, empty beige desert below. Deliberately, one by one, I ate all of my peanuts. At least I would make good on that.

Getting back to work in our unfestive apartment was more difficult than I’d imagined. A week after our return I was poring over the Federal Truth in Lending Disclosure Upon Renewal of Annual Fee statement, written in fine print on the back of our credit card bill, instead of extracting Robert from a warren of North Vietnamese tunnels, when Ted interrupted me.

“Come here, Margaret. There’s something I want to show you.”

Warily, I advanced as far as the doorway. “Shouldn’t you be going to your office?”

“Not yet. Just come over here.” He spoke calmly, but there was obviously nothing pleasant over on his side of the room.

“What?” I said again, as casually as possible. I stood beside him at the table now.

“I just want you to see this,” he said. “Just so we’re on the same page.”

“Literally,” I said, as he opened the ledger.

He smiled weakly and patted the seat of the chair beside him. I sat in it.

“See here?” he said. He actually wanted me to look at the back of an envelope. The ledger was only to support his case. On the envelope, he’d printed with his Razor Point the months from January through July. “I’m going to make two columns.”

“Would you like to use my markers?” I suggested, jumping up. “Sometimes things look more organized when you use color.”

“Black will be fine.”

So I had to sit down again.

“We’ll call one column,” he said as he wrote, “monthly credits and the other monthly debits.”

“Ted.” I was getting annoyed now. “I have to get back to work. What’s the bottom line?”

He raised his finger. He had an infuriating way of raising his finger. “You see,” he said, “I don’t know yet. I want us to do this together. I don’t want it to be me telling you. You’re perfectly free to check the ledger, you know. Any time you want to take some responsibility.”

I closed my eyes so as to keep from closing my teeth around that finger.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s see.”

“OK, here’s my monthly salary, minus FICA and taxes and so forth.” The figure he wrote beside each of the months included pennies.

“You know the cents?”

“Of course.” He looked at me as if I were the crazy one. “Then there’s a little interest on our savings.” He knew this figure by heart, as well. He wrote it next to January.

“What about the other months?”

“We’ll have to see. If our savings drop, the interest will be less.”

“What do you mean, ‘If our savings drop’? We’re saving to buy a place. We don’t want to spend that.”

“No,” he agreed, “we don’t want to, but …” He made a little box in the lower left-hand corner and labeled it “Savings as of January 1.” The envelope was getting crowded and it really would have looked much better in colors. “What’s our savings at right now?”

I shrugged.

He shook his head. “You see, Margaret! This is exactly what I mean!”

“I know what it is approximately,” I said defensively.

“Approximately is no good here! We need exact figures! Are you going to say to the scary guy at the A&P, ‘I’ll pay you approximately what I owe’? I don’t think so!”

The analogy was not at all clear to me, but I forbore pointing that out.

“All right. This is what we have in savings right now. And this is what we have in the checking account. Of course, there’s no interest on that.” He wrote both these figures in the corner box. “We can draw on the money in the savings account. If we have to.” He looked at me. “Now, let’s see if we have to.” He opened the ledger. “We can estimate our expenses for January will be very similar to December’s,” he began, but I interrupted.

“But we were away for a week in December.”

“Good thinking. So, in fact, we’ll have to add more for the paper we stopped and for the electricity we didn’t use.” He scribbled some figures on the envelope.

“But we can’t count the plane tickets!” I said, “We won’t be buying plane tickets in January!” I was feeling a little frantic. When it suited his purposes, Ted seemed to think approximation was perfectly acceptable.

“Actually, we bought those in November.”

“All right,” I agreed, sullenly. “January will be a little more than December. Approximately,” I couldn’t resist adding.

He wrote that figure in the monthly debits column. “Which will mean …” he said, looking at me significantly.

Ted was right. Black was fine. It looked like red anyway when the debit number was larger than the credit number. Which it would be, according to Ted’s projections, beginning in July.

“We’ll have to borrow from our savings,” I admitted.

“And you see how the interest will then dwindle,” he added, officiously.

It was always difficult for me to believe that there weren’t plenty of ways for us to spend less. We bought things we didn’t desperately need—candles, for instance, and health insurance. We ate better than we had to, and we contributed regularly to retirement funds. We were middle class, for God’s sake. If we were willing to eke by for a while, how could we not have enough money? “Fine!” I said. “You’ve convinced me! I’ll give up shampoo!”

“Margaret, I’m not trying to convince you of anything. I wanted to work on this together, remember? But you can see, can’t you, that dirty hair isn’t going to make all that much of a difference?”

“What about,” I whispered, my eyes fixed on a clump of cat fur under the table, “credit cards?”

“Margaret, you don’t mean that.” Ted equated credit card borrowing with selling a firstborn child. “Anyway,” he said, resting his hand on my shoulder, “we’ll be fine as long as you’re finished by June, which it sounds like you will be. And if you need another month or two, I could probably sell an article.”

I squeezed my head between my palms to create a counter-pressure. I could imagine the conversation we’d have in June when there was no book and no money.

“You know,” I said, as Ted neatly inserted the envelope of figures between two pages of the ledger for safekeeping, “maybe I
should look for a part-time job. Trollope, you know, worked in the post office, and look how much he produced.”

“I don’t know if that’s such a great idea. You don’t want to slow the work down. Sally Sternforth turned down an assignment to do a piece on Cuba once she got into her book. She didn’t want other projects distracting her.”

“But just because I’m into it,” I argued, following him to the door, “I could probably afford the distraction. I think it’s only a matter of organizing my time efficiently.”

“Let’s think about it,” he said and kissed me goodbye. At the landing, he turned back. I was closing the door, but I heard his words distinctly. “Work hard,” he said.

Work hard! I would have been happy to work hard. It wasn’t that I was lazy. It was just that I didn’t know what, exactly, to do. Telling a person to work hard on a novel is like telling a person to think. You can’t just do it on command. I slumped in the chair and laid my head for a moment on the table, my face in the figures Ted had written. Why not get a job, I thought, something part-time? If I were making money, finishing the novel by June—which was obviously not going to happen—would be less crucial. Also, it might in fact be true, as I’d argued to Ted, that curtailing my hours could actually help me to focus and get more done in the remaining time. I clearly didn’t need to keep the entire day free so that I could peruse the back of the credit card bill.

I remembered the card the freelance guy had given me. Having been a student and a teacher, wasn’t I qualified to do all manner of research, writing, and editing, or even perhaps seminar or conference running, what with my experience in front of a class? I could freelance as a communications specialist. I was not sure
what “communications” meant in the business world, having previously thought of the term only as a long way to say “talk,” but I could learn.

Dear M—

The children and I were invited to swim today. At Jeanette’s. When she gave me directions and it was clear we’d be crossing Sunset, I suspected her house would be nice, maybe even nicer than Zoe and Brad’s, so I thought I was prepared, but, in fact, a person like me cannot be prepared for such a place. I may have left some drool on her windows
.

The house was hidden from the road, of course. And the driveway was blocked with the usual mechanical gate, the security device of choice among those living north of Sunset and aesthetically preferable to the bars people south of Pico install over their windows. I spoke into the intercom, as if ordering hamburgers, and then the gate swung slowly open, its little motor humming
.

“Hurry, Mom,” Hunter said. He was worried that the gate would close on us before we were through (in disgust, I suppose, when it realized it was admitting a car equipped with crank windows). The driveway slipped gracefully through a small grove of eucalyptus to a parking area where we left the Tercel next to a silver Lexus SUV and a bronze BMW coupe. (Jeanette’s husband must drive the gold car.) Along the walls of the house huge terra-cotta pots held flowering trees. Do you have any idea how expensive a pot large enough to hold a tree is? Not to mention the trees themselves. I counted ten of them
.

Jeanette came out to meet us in a chic little sunsuit, wincing as her bare, pedicured feet touched the hot brick of the back patio. Jake and India, her children, gamboled beside her in all-cotton bathing suits available in Neiman Marcus and certain Malibu boutiques. Needless to say,
I was shuffling along in gym shorts and rubber flip-flops from the drugstore, as were my children
.

How can I describe the tastefulness of her house? The gracious width of the hallways between unscuffed, custard-colored walls. The brown-sugar-stained floorboards. The whimsically hung paintings by California artists. The buttery leather couch cushions. The grand piano with its slightly yellow keys
.

Jeanette had assured me that her house, like mine, was full of junk. There is, however, absolutely no similarity between the Peabodys’ furnishings and ours. Her children’s desks are made of “reclaimed” pine, their well-grained surfaces gently “distressed.” They evoke history: the farmwife scrubbing, one hand spreading the scouring sand, scooped from the creek bed at dawn, the other wielding the rough, homespun cloth, dipped in clear water, also scooped from the creek at dawn. Or the young scholar, sleeve secured in an elastic band, polishing the wood with his elbow, as he declines his Greek nouns with a quill dipped in ink. Indeed, a discreet and lovely blotch of black ink near one corner endowed Jake’s desk with character. Marlo (thus far, the only child of ours with her own desk) works on plastic laminated “wood,” produced when sawdust left over after boards have been cut is pressed into an incredibly heavy slab that bears no resemblance to the tree from which it came. Her brothers’ trucks and her mother’s X-acto knife have painfully scored its hard, impersonal finish, and markers, overreaching the page they were coloring, have fringed the surface here and there with their unnatural hues
.